Joe Biden and his family and political allies opened the door for Donald Trump to become president again when they ignored the simple reality that Biden was simply too damn old to do another term.
Published: 22 May 2025
No one in his circle would tell him that straight.
The Democratic Party chickened out and focused on maintaining the façade.
More alarming for democracy, the partisan press – particularly liberals consumed by their hatred of Trump and their contempt for the kind of voters who warmed to him – chose to believe the unbelievable and collude in covering up the blindingly obvious.
The people whose mantra was “telling truth to power”, who bragged of their roles in such historic events as bringing down President Nixon over Watergate in 1974 and who dug the dirt on Trump so assiduously – and sometimes unscrupulously – that he was landed in court repeatedly, ignored what ordinary people who looked at their president being incoherent on TV or at public events could often see.
There was a sane group of activists who set up a campaign called “Don’t run Joe”, but the mainstream press and the party fixers largely ignored it.
But the cover-up is now blown apart with Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which I’m reading.
It’s based on so many 200 authoritative interviews it’s impossible to ignore or dismiss.
They give the simple facts they uncovered about “Biden’s health and abilities; the silence of witnesses; the complicity of enablers; and the scheming of those who endeavoured to hide it from others and from the public.”
“‘He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine,’ they all said. This was the experience of dozens of officials, from politicians to donors to left-leaning pundits.”
It’s difficult not to feel sympathy for Biden, whose life was marked by the humiliation of a bad childhood stutter, and terrible tragedies like the car accident that killed his wife and daughter in 1972, the loss of his son Beau to cancer in 2015 and the disintegration into drink and drug addiction of his surviving son Hunter.
His mantra “Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you’ve been knocked down” took him to the presidency, but it also took him to the self-delusion that marked his later years.
Yes, he could function decently as president most of the time, but only for a few hours a day, and, increasingly, he forgot names even of his aides and friends, lost his train of thought and froze up.
And he made dumb decisions.
It was Biden who chose Kamala Harris as his vice-president, though she was obviously unqualified to be his successor and who wrecked what chance she had by stubbornly insisting he would run again and thus blocking the opportunity for the party to select a candidate who could defeat Trump.
It’ll be fascinating to see if this brings the liberal intelligentsia to their senses.
